Her Billionaire Toy Boy

“Welcome, welcome,” she said—a tad absentmindedly; Mira saw her eyes darting over the various couples and their mise en places, and wondered if she was doing some sort of last-minute quality check. “Tonight we will be preparing simple food with fantastic technique. Let’s begin by giving our attention to the asparagus….”

Mira plucked an asparagus from the bunch that lay before her and regarded it. It wasn’t a vegetable which she thought about that often or gravitated towards ordering whenever she went out to eat. She thought of them generally as brown, slimy, and hard to eat—like overcooked celery. She looked up at Sam with skepticism written on her face. Sam nodded encouragingly. “It’s going to be ridiculously delicious,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“What, you’re not a vegetable person?”

“I mean…”

“Just wait,” said Sam, taking the asparagus spear from her. “You’re going to love it.”

Sam began to bend the asparagus spear in two, and a second later there was a satisfying popping noise. The pithy end of the stalk had snapped cleanly from the rest of the vegetable. “If you don’t love asparagus, it’s probably because you’ve been eating bad asparagus,” he said, firmly. “Overcooked and stringy, right?”

“Yep.”

“Well,” said Sam, only sort of paying attention to the chef at the front, “We’re not going to do anything like that today. We’re going to respect the asparagus, Mira.”

“Respect the asparagus?”

“You’ve got to,” Sam said, winking. “Now, take one and bend it in half to get rid of the bad part, eh?”

Mira selected another spear and broke it in two.

“It’s a smart veg, you see? It knows precisely where it should end….respect the asparagus, just do what it wants and everything will be fine.”

“This is weird,” said Mira, but she was laughing.

“Laugh now, but this will be the best asparagus you’ve ever tasted.”

Mira giggled and continued snapping spears in two.

Shortly the chef set them all to work on whisking egg yolks for souffles. They were to be goat cheese and chive flavored, and Mira had great fun in learning for the very first time what precisely a chive was. Sam showed her how to mince them so that they were as small as the periods ending sentences, gently but firmly guiding her hands in a pinch hold on the chef’s knife. He showed her the rocking motion which professional cooks use to cut things—no dramatic and dangerous chopping involved, actually—and he surprised her with the finesse with which he deftly used the pastry cutter to sweep up all of their cuttings and deposit them cleanly into the baking dish.

“Ah, this part is my favorite,” said Sam, when the chef deposited a bowl of golden yellow cheese in front of them.

“What was that,” said Mira, sharply. She was unaware that Sam had done this particular cooking class before. Here he was acting as if he knew enough to anticipate specific steps in the process. She knew that he was exceptionally good at cooking, but it would have made her sad to think that he was reliving all of this again—especially when she considered that this was a date night sort of thing. She didn’t want to be thinking about the hypothetical sets of numerous girls he had taken here, to live through this experience with him, to stand smiling by, and ooh and aah over Sam’s prowess as he showed them precisely how to fold egg whites so that they did not fall.

Sam interrupted her increasingly dismal reverie by putting his hand dramatically onto her shoulder. “Cheese. It’s the best part of anything,” he said, grinning. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

Mira’s hackles fell and she realized that her suspicion must have been just that—a suspicion. She took a deep, shaky breath and smiled at Sam. “So, what do we have here?”

“Fresh, crumbly goat’s cheese,” Sam said solemnly. He picked up a chunk. “See, I think it’s fascinating. With all of the whisking and dicing and mincing and all that, the goal is to get everything as uniform as possible, right? All the tiny herbs as small as they can be, as same in size as possible; the yolks and the whites as smooth and innocuous as we can beat them to be. But here’s when you realize that all of that is in service of providing a backdrop which will allow the things which we allow to remain craggy to really pop; you know? For cooking and eating isn’t about enjoying the homogeneous; eating is an adventure, with something new—some beautiful spice profile, some deep and challenging cheese—waiting around every corner.”

Mira did not know how to reply to Sam when he began waxing and waning about food as if it were something poetic in and of itself. She liked cheese; that was as much as she knew.

“Would you like to try a piece?” he asked, very gravely. Mira tried her best to stifle a smile and nodded seriously as well. She took the chunk of goat cheese he offered her and popped it into her mouth. Then she closed her eyes. The sweetness! The saltiness! The sharpness! It was easily one of the best cheeses she had ever had—better, by miles, than the hard blocks of neon-yellow cheddar which she picked up in the supermarket.

“Okay,” said Mira, “Fine! I give. That was heavenly.”

“Goat’s cheese,” said Sam. “One of the finest in the area—the cooking school has a farm which they use for all of their classes. So this cheese was actually made on the premises. You can really taste the difference, can’t you?”

And for the first time, Mira thought that she might understand why Sam was so excited about food.

“What makes it so much better?”

“Well, time, for one,” said Sam seriously. “That’s the freshest cheese you’re ever going to taste. And the people here really take care of their animals; the animals here aren’t kept penned up all day, they eat a good diet, and are kept happy. It has an amazing effect on the food they produce; which makes a lot of sense if you think about it.”

Mira thought about it. It made sense.

Next, the chef put them to whisking together a flour-less chocolate cake, using only cocoa, butter, and eggs.

“It’ll be sort of like a lava cake, and sort of like the fudgiest brownie you’ve ever tasted,” whispered Sam as Mira poured the dark chocolate cocoa powder into the bowl he was whisking. One of the key takeaways Mira was taking from the class was that fine dining and cooking required a lot of whisking—and she wasn’t surprised that many of the chefs she saw had ridiculously well-shaped arms. Hers were beginning to feel sore, and she was gladly letting Sam take over most of the whisking for the rest of the day.

“Ah,” said Mira. “I can’t wait. This is all so much better than I could have hoped.”

Sam gave her a quick smile. “That’s so good to hear,” he said, quietly, and a quick crackle of electricity rushed over Mira’s warm brown skin, bringing a darker flush to her cheeks. She smiled and took another sip of her wine.